KUALA LUMPUR: Technology and hybrid cloud has emerged as the ‘force for change’ given the need for businesses to realise greater speed to market and flexibility to respond to economic changes and buyer behaviour.
IBM Malaysia managing director Catherine Lian said technology is vital in pivoting towards desired outcomes and guarding against disruptive competitors.
“This means eliminating data silos and automate data wrangling and integration,” Catherine told The New Straits Times.
Within the sphere of technology, she pointed out that hybrid cloud is swiftly becoming the dominant force driving industry changes.
Hybrid cloud is essentially information technology (IT) infrastructure that connects multiple type of clouds such as public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises IT before providing management and application portability to create a single, flexible, optimal cloud infrastructure for running computing workloads.
“A hybrid cloud strategy helps a company achieve its technical and business objectives more cost-efficiently,” said Catherine.
“The multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment also provides invaluable advantages for enterprises, especially those needed for survival and growth in an increasingly data led, expanding digital era,” she further said, adding that it is essential for businesses to succeed in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR).
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, IBM Malaysia is seeing an acceleration in the adoption of hybrid cloud as companies transform into becoming truly digital enterprises, shared Catherine.
“A hybrid cloud platform approach delivers 2.5 times more value than a traditional, public cloud only approach,” Catherine said, adding that more companies are turning to application modernisation, process automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) infusion and insights.
The objectives are to deliver better, scalable, and more secure digital services, while serving customers and helping employees work better.
“Without cloud technology, no organisation can achieve the level of speed and agility needed to thrive,” said Catherine.
“A scalable, secure and flexible cloud-based IT infrastructure has been key for organisations to adapt their new operating models.
“This has resulted in an acceleration in the adoption of hybrid cloud technology and services, allowing organisations to run workloads on-premises, in the private cloud and in the public cloud,” she said.
According to an IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey, business executives in Malaysia are increasingly planning to invest in hybrid multi-cloud platform strategies and capabilities to drive business transformation and to unlock value.
The survey estimated that Malaysian business leader plan to increase their organisations’ share of hybrid cloud expenditure to 46 percent by 2023.
“Enterprises in Malaysia are seeking an application development platform that can run on any cloud, workloads that can execute seamlessly across multiple clouds, and a comprehensive orchestration capability that spans across clouds,” Catherine said.
And with data analytics emerging as a foundation for strategic decisions, establishing a hybrid cloud data platform is fast becoming a critical priority for numerous organisations.
“With multi-cloud capabilities, businesses would be able to realise greater efficiencies, security and faster data management capabilities,” said Catherine, adding that business processes can also be enhanced to increase competitiveness.
When asked as to what an appropriate hybrid cloud strategy should be, Catherine said it must be one that embraces compliance and security needs, and that movement of apps and data to the cloud be seamless and efficient.
“While scalability and flexibility are a part of enterprise digital transformation strategy, security needs to be addressed even before it enters the environment,” she said.
IBM Malaysia’s clientele today spans numerous industries – including banking and financial services, telecommunications, public sector, retail and manufacturing – together with small-medium businesses (SMBs).
Catherine cited MADX Panel, a leading Malaysian fintech software solutions company, as a customer which is implementing IBM Cloud solutions to improve digital services for its micro and SMB clients across Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asia region.
“Building and maintaining up-to-date digital infrastructure is critical for organisations to achieve higher levels of efficiency and agility especially in this challenging time, and MADX is working to help clients achieve this,” said Catherine.
MADX Panel director Ribena Lai recently said “collaborating with IBM will enable us to enhance our digital capabilities and continue developing innovative products and services for our clients at a competitive cost.”
“By implementing IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers, we can now create value for our clients and provide secure and high-performance business solutions to help clients future-proof their businesses,” said Ribena.